The Society for Structural Integrity and Life (DIVK) was established on 6 March 2001, following the proposal of Prof. Dragoslav Šumarac, Faculty at Civil Engineering, and Prof. Stojan Sedmak, Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy (TMF), University of Belgrade, Serbia. 93 founder members were present at the constitution assembly, held in GOŠA Institute (Belgrade, Serbia). Since November 2006, the DIVK Governing Board has been headed by Prof. Dr. Aleksan¬dar Sedmak, Mechanical Engineering Faculty, University of Belgrade.

An agreement between DIVK and GOŠA was also made on joint publishing the journal “Structural Integrity and Life” (Integritet i vek konstrukcija - IVK), as an official edition of DIVK.

The need to form DIVK was supported by increasing cooperation of experts from Serbia with the European Structural Integrity Society (ESIS). Former Yugoslavia was a successful organizer of the 9th ESIS European Conference on Fracture (ECF9), held in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1992. There were two reasons to commit ECF 9 organization to Yugoslavia. The first was high level of International Fracture Mechanics Summer Schools (IFMASS), established in 1980 and held 5 times before 1992. The second was continuous partici¬pation of Yugoslav delegation in ESIS that started in 1982 at ECF4 in Leoben, Austria.

In spite of challenges related to the political situation in the region during the 1990s, continuity in active participation in ESIS activities was maintained up to the founding of DIVK, always with more than ten registered ESIS members from former Yugoslavia. These members have actively made contributions at all ECFs since 1982.

DIVK would like to underline the substantial help it has received from GOŠA  company, in gathering experts from former Yugoslavia in International Fracture Mechanics Summer School   (IFMASS). Since 1974 GOŠA engaged a group of experts for the analysis of brittle fracture and integrity problems of the pipeline in hydroelectric plant “Bajina Bašta”, which is weld¬ed of high strength steel and required crack analy¬sis and introduction of fracture mechanics.

]The initiative of Michael Wnuk, visiting professor at the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy, to organize IFMASS had been followed by the proposal of his host S. Sedmak, to Tihoslav Tošić, direc¬tor of GOŠA company. The proposal was accepted and financially supported. So, in 1980 the first IFMASS “Introduc¬tion to fracture mechanics and fracture-safe design”, had been organized, with 8 domestic and 6 foreign lecturers presenting 21 lectures. The first IFMASS attracted 62 participants.

Seven Schools had been organized before founding DIVK in 2001. The increasing interest resulted in extended number of participants from Yugoslavia and abroad: 142 at IFMASS 5, held in 1989 in Dubrovnik and 138 at IFMASS 7, held in 1997 in Velika Plana. The IFMASS 5 mono¬graph “Application of Fracture Mechanics to Life Estimation of Power Plant Components” was published in English in 1990 with EMAS (Engineering Materials Advisory Services Publishing, England). IFMASS 7 monograph “Experimental and Numerical Methods” (2000, published in Serbian) was an introduction to estab¬lishing DIVK. It should also be said that GOŠA Institute and TMF published first 7 monographs with other co-publishers in some cases.